This paper studies the role of pensions and income taxes in determining homeownership and household wealth. It provides a cross-country analysis, using tax and pension policy designs in Germany, the US and Australia. These developed nations have similar incomes per capita but very different...

This paper investigates the fiscal pressure from demographic change in relation to the labour marketspace for fifty countries that cover 75% of the world population. The pressure-to-space indicator ranks Poland, Turkey and Greece high. Apart from Turkey and India, developing countries rank low...

This paper studies retirement and child support policies in a small, open, overlapping-generations economy with PAYG social security and endogenous retirement and fertility decisions. It demonstrates that neither fertility nor retirement choices necessarily coincide with socially optimal...

We exploit a unique Swiss reform to identify the importance of passivity, claiming social security benefits at the Full Retirement Age (FRA). Sharp discontinuities generated by the reform reveal that raising the FRA while imposing small early claiming penalties significantly delays pension...

The policy brief presents a review of potential effects of parametric pension reform in Belarus starting in 2017 for the population aged 50 and more in terms of unemployment, alcohol consumption, and poverty. It concludes that, despite the fact that raising the retirement age is overdue in...

We propose a unified framework to measure the effects of different reforms of the pension system on retirement ages and macroeconomic indicators in the face of demographic change. A rich overlapping generations (OLG) model is built and endogenous retirement decisions are explicitly modeled...

Many defined-benefit pension systems in developed and developing countries use a small set of final years of earnings to compute pension benefits. This provides dynamic incentives to report higher earnings in the final years of the career. In this paper, we document the responses of...

In his seminal model (Feldstein, 1985), the government operates a social security system to counter the representative worker's myopia. (i) For a complete myope, he determined a sizable optimal tax rate (and the corresponding benefit level). (ii) For a partially shortsighted worker, he...

This paper studies the economic effects on re-employment and program substitution behavior among elderly displaced workers who exogenously lose eligibility for their early retirement option. We use detailed Norwegian matched employer-employee data containing information on bankruptcy dates and...

Faced with the need to adjust public pension systems to meet changing demographic, economic and social conditions, most developed countries have created government reserve funds to ensure macroeconomic sustainability. This paper aims to study the importance that this reserve fund plays in the...